So I'm installing Gentoo on a new machine. I'm trying to pick a new WM.
I'm somewhat of a minimalist, but at the same time it's always nice to have something that looks good.
For years I used Openbox. It requires a bit of setup work, but the end product was fast, elegantly simple and pleasing to the eye. Also, very few dependencies which I liked. I used it in conjunction with the tint2 bar, which was somewhat ugly but functional and fast.

I switched to i3 because I was bored and kept hearing how awesome it is. For the most part I like it a lot. Probably about as fast as Openbox. The tiling WM is a learning curve but pretty nice once you get used to it. Very useful on a laptop since the mouse isn't really needed. I really hate the i3 bar however. It is really funny about it's syntax and tends to break by itself for no apparent reason.

That's not my reason for switching. I'm just looking for new things to try. If nothing else I'll just go back to openbox.

I'm using E17 right now. It's a bit RAM-heavy with compositing turned on (~100MB RSS) but it feels fast and lightweight instead of like a full DE. There's a tiling mode, but it's configurable per-workspace instead of all-or-nothing.

Hmmm..... All three options sound interesting. I actually ran enlightenment for a short time in the 90's Thats the last time I used it. Maybe I should give it another try. I've also heard a lot of good about awesome.

I've been using awesome for 3 or 4 years, until last month, when I moved to i3. I'm not having any problems with i3bar, altough I do feed it with conky.

Awesome is an automatic tiling wm, you don't need to setup workspaces like with i3, you just open clients, and tell awesome which window layout to use, and it arranges them automatically. I moved to i3 because it is more flexible with windows distribution.

One main and obvious difference between them, is awesome doesn't have stacked or tabbed layout, I open lots of windows, and end using more workspaces with awesome (this is the main reason I switched to i3).

Awesome seems to be developed with the idea of being a framework to build your own wm, it has a complete and very well documented API. where you can access to every single aspect of it. It's configuration file is written in lua, a very simple (but complete) scripting language, where you can modify every behaviour. It is the more elastic wm I've ever seen, but with a very sane and completely useful default config which you can use with almost no modification.

Yeah, I thought about that, and started searching for something that would work better. The problem is that if I'm not mistaken dmenu depends on the i3bar. dmenu is one of my favorite things about i3. I have key combos set up to start more common programs, but the rest I can just use dmenu, and as opposed to a run command I only need to know part of the file name.

Honestly I should probably try messing with i3bar again. I have never had so much trouble with a config file before and I just got sick of messing with it.

Tiling WM's are reaslly the way to go, but discouraging i3 due to its bar is funny at least. Go with dzen and dmenu and enjoy i3.

I have tried most of tiling WMs, and in my opinion i3 and awesome are probably the best ones if you do not need something very specific (like a WM written in Haskell ). Among these two awesome seems to be better in handling multi monitor setups (I mean more than two monitors), due to screen-specific list of tags. If I have beenworking on one screen, I'd probably be using i3._________________BTW, TWM FTW!

Awesome has been my TWM of choice for quite some time. I'm not going to try convince you to use it though, your best bet is to get a list of TWM that sound good to you and use each one for a few days or so and see which one you like best at the end - if you get stuck between two or more then it's time to fork/write your own

Just tried it, and the first impression is very good. Unfortunately, it needs a lot of customization and minor fixes to be as useful as vanilla fvwm (I replied in the thread you cited since it makes perhaps sense to keep the discussion about details to fvwm-crystal there).

Just out of curiosity, what's wrong with vanilla fvwm and a really nice config?

There's nothing wrong with it except you have to do everything manually: It is a time issue.
I was hoping that with FVWM-Crystal I could get all the modern faildesktop.org stuff for free (e.g. support for laptop and things), but actually it did not even honour ~/.config/autostart (and the acpi stuff display crashed after 5 seconds with a segfault). At least you get a nice menu. But since it does not really follow the standard there occur things like listing /usr/bin/flock (which probably almost everybody has from util-linux as a web-browser
I will remain with my ancient fvwm configuration (beginnings originating to redhat 5 or so...)

You and I might be of an age. It seems to me redhat 5 came out a bit after I started with redhat. Back before the IPO and its miracle stock market antics launched Linux into the public eye. I THINK it was around 1996 or maybe 1995.

Anyway, it seems you prefer to start with fvwm rather than crystal, that's good to know. Your complaints about ~/.config/autostart and faildesktop.org are for crystal or for stock fvwm?

I'm sorry, but I've been following your thread since it started, I'm interested in the recommendations for my own purposes.

Your complaints about ~/.config/autostart and faildesktop.org are for crystal or for stock fvwm?

It's the same for both: You do not get support for the new "standards" (neither with stock fvwm nor with crystal) unless you write it by yourself.
For somebody who has no configuration to start with, I do not know what to recommend: crystal makes use of some nice features of fvwm but also hides other features and is simply unprofessionally written (see my comments in the other thread). It seems that it is a similar problem with fvwm as with zsh: Both can do a lot, but without configuring it you cannot see their power. And it is hard to find a reasonable configuration somewhere. (Except of course the one-and-only zshrc which you can find in the mv overlay )

Ah, something that comes back to my mind: I couldn't get tearing-less video playback with awesome.
Hadn't time to debug that and also I was about to switch to dwm anyways where there were no problems with that.
Can awesome-users confirm working/ not working tearingless videos? Sorry if that is to OT_________________https://gentoo.cosmofox.net/

Just for the records: With the patches I attached to the other thread, fvwm-crystal is perhaps really an alternative.
Edit: Removed comments about slowdown, since I described in the patches how to fix it.